[0xbadcafebee]

Of all the micro-optimizations I could think of for web apps, the one with the highest cost and the least benefit would probably be supporting http2 (or *quic). In almost all cases, there is a fix that will speed up http1.1 to acceptable levels.

[RussianCow]

What's the "cost" to supporting HTTP 2 as an app developer, though? As far as I know, adding support to nginx requires changing one line of code. That's about as close to free as you can get.

[peterwwillis]

For a tiny startup, you might be able to just add http2 support in 10 minutes and everything might be fine, but most of the time it's more complicated. It's a bit like if I said, can I change your app libraries to bleeding edge? It's just a one line change.

[RussianCow]

Could you be more specific, though? What's more complicated? I'm legitimately curious because I know very little about HTTP 2, but at work (not a tiny startup) we recently enabled it and it turned out to be a trivial change. Unless you're implementing the networking layer of your backend yourself, it seems like a change with practically no cost or tradeoff, as long as your server software supports it.

[peterwwillis]

I haven't implemented it myself, but here's some example scenarios:

Policy: What is allowed architecturally and what isn't? Are there regulatory requirements? Do you have strict enforcement mechanisms?

Instrumentation: Do you need to watch traffic going over the wire? Will your network filters flag it? Do you have application proxies that route traffic based on payload? How is it going to handle multiplexing if existing solutions don't take it into account? Are you using any proprietary stuff?

QA: Every client, server and intermediary may be using different implementations, and that means bugs. Have you certified all the devices in the chain to make sure they operate correctly? (It doesn't matter, until it really matters)

Operation: Each implementation needs to be upgraded one at a time, so the extent of your technology will determine how long and potentially error-prone all this will be. It will be different for each org, but definitely take a long time for really big ones.

[RussianCow]

This all makes sense. I guess ultimately, the more moving parts you have, the more things can go wrong with a change like this. Thanks!

[irrational]

I imagine its more bureaucratic complexity than technical. This change would require lots of committee meetings, reviews, meetings, discussions, etc. at my company. It would probably take a year to decide to do it and 5 days to actually do it (Get all IT groups into a large war room, make the change on dev servers and then everyone has to completely test all their apps and sign off on it. Then do it again on staging. Then again on prod. It would probably require a bunch of all nighters. I wish I was joking.)

[h1d]

How do you get your work done when 1 line change takes so long.

[pizza]

Changing a version number is a special type of one line change because it only appears to be a one line change. In reality, that could end up being potentially millions of lines of code being changed in dependencies.

[noselasd]

We had nginx running as a proxy for one of the apps. It runs on RHEL 7 because that's the standard for the enterprise. The stock nginx available in nginx did not support http/2.

* There is no chance someone will approve this server to run a nginx instance someone compiled themselves

* There is no chance someone will approve this server to run anything but nginx as that's the company standard for proxy servers.

* There is no chance someone will approve this server to install software from a 3. party yum repository. (And that's even a much bigger chance than someone allowing the firewall in front of that server to allow outgoing connections to the internet, so installing form 3. party repos could even be performed)

In the end there was likely 2 ways to get http/2 support for that service: * Pay some 3.d party to make it happen and be responsible for that server. * Wait until nginx in RHEL (the epel repository, which was approved and mirrored internally) supported http/2.

We did the latter, which happened many months later.

[johncolanduoni]

One thing I’ve ran into is misconfigured native apps who accidentally treat headers as case sensitive. In particular the usual HTTP client in iOS handles header case sensitivity for you, unless you use newer versions of Swift where it converts the custom header dictionary into a vanilla Swift one that doesn’t treat header lookups as case-insensitive :/

[rjmunro]

Supporting http2 at an nginx reverse proxy doesn't help the problem in the original post, which is mostly about internal connections between microservices, e.g. going from your nginx proxy to your node or rails server.

Putting http2 here is a pain because you probably don't want https. You'd have to have nginx decrypt and reencrypt all the traffic, and you'd have to deal with certificates etc.

[cm2187]

Server push can’t be free. You need the web server to somehow know what resources will be required by the page and I still don’t understand how it doesn’t defeat browser caching but I presume it must involve some non trivial configuration.

[johncolanduoni]

Server push also isn’t required to reap most of the benefits. In the places where I’ve tried it I’ve not seen any benefit over link preload headers + HTTP2 without push. Many CDNs that support HTTP2 haven’t bothered to support server push at all, I suspect due to the limited advantages compared to the extra complexity.

[youngtaff]

Pretty sure server push is being deprecated - current implementation is 'only half a feature', as clients lack the ability to tell the server what's already in cache.

In theory the client can cancel the response for a resource it's already got but by the time the response bytes reach the client it's really too late

[cm2187]

Yeah and if the client volunteers the list of all it has in cache it would result in some massive requests and a kind of quasi-cookie.

I always found this feature interesting but weird.

[VBprogrammer]

Random thought. But isn't this a potential use for a bloom filter?

[youngtaff]

Yes bloom filters were a potential for Cache Digests, original prototype for Cache Digests used Golomb coded set as memory representation is smaller than Bloom filter

https://github.com/h2o/h2o/issues/421

But then Cache Digests moved onto Cuckoo Filters - https://github.com/httpwg/http-extensions/pull/413

[zaarn]

Your webapp needs to start the push, browsers will interrupt it if they find the resource is already in cache after it has parsed the HTML.